{"id":1906,"date":"2016-05-16T08:56:02","date_gmt":"2016-05-16T15:56:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/?p=1906"},"modified":"2016-05-16T08:56:02","modified_gmt":"2016-05-16T15:56:02","slug":"down-on-the-street","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/?p=1906","title":{"rendered":"Down on the street"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reed Farrel Coleman, an established master of the hard-boiled detective genre, has a novel out that\u2019s billed as the start of a new series, about Gus Murphy, a retired cop in Suffolk County, N.Y. Bob Moyer, an established fan of noir books, finds it a promising beginning.<\/p>\n

Reviewed by Robert P. Moyer<\/p>\n

WHERE IT HURTS. By Reed Farrell Coleman. Putnam. 353 pages. $27.<\/p>\n

\"Hurts\"<\/a>Reed Farrell Coleman sure knows his way around Long Island.\u00a0 Whenever he heads out, ex-cop Gus Murphy travels through a detailed landscape that gives context to his search for answers.\u00a0 \u201cRight around where Union Avenue turns into Long Island Avenue is one of those ugly patches we Long Islanders like to pretend don\u2019t exist \u2026 where the dirty work gets done by brown-skinned men,\u201d and Gus gets shot. He stops to talk to the owner of Harrigan\u2019s Bar, where the \u201cmutts\u201d at the bar \u201c\u2026never know if the next guy coming though the door was there to collect on their debts or to extract late fees \u2026 as much matters of skin and bone as dollars and cents.\u201d\u00a0 A Christmas Santa mooning passersby on a neighboring roof illuminates an empty lot where T.J. Delcamino\u2019s body was dumped.<\/p>\n

The author\u2019s Long Island is \u201c\u2026a place of demarcations:\u00a0 some subtle and gradual, some obvious and ugly,\u201d and a place that lets him demonstrate something else:\u00a0 Coleman sure knows his way around the hard-boiled genre.<\/p>\n

Gus drives a shuttle van for an airport motel people didn\u2019t come to to stay, they \u201c\u2026came here to leave.\u201d His career, his family, his life, all fractured by the unexpected death of his son, he lives in that limbo Where It Hurts<\/em>.\u00a0 Until Tommy Delcamino comes along, and shakes Gus \u201c\u2026from (his) grief-stricken sleepwalk.\u201d\u00a0 When Tommy asks him to look into the death of his\u00a0son TJ, Gus turns him down at first.\u00a0 When he decides to talk to Tommy about it, he finds his body \u2014 and a bullet for himself.\u00a0 That\u2019s when the gumshoe hits the ground.<\/p>\n

Gus gets shoved around, shot at again, and shunted off even by his old police buddies, letting him know somebody doesn\u2019t want him snooping around.\u00a0 In true fashion of the genre, that intent only increases Gus\u2019 intent.\u00a0 He gets a light back in his eye, and then hits that point in any good Private Eye book,\u00a0when \u201ca flurry of images \u2026 flashed through my head.\u00a0 And suddenly things had fallen into place.\u201d<\/p>\n

Coleman takes us \u201c\u2026down on the street where the violence and dark magic was done,\u201d and brings both the reader and Gus back into the light with more answers than when we started.<\/p>\n